Modeling rolling gaits of a snake robot

Abstract

Successful deployment of a snake robot in search and rescue tasks requires the capability of generating controls which can adapt to unknown environments in real-time. However, available motion generation techniques can be computationally expensive and lack the ability to adapt to the surroundings. This work considers modeling the rolling motion of a snake robot by applying the Bellows model with computation reduction techniques. One benefit of this is that controllers are defined with physically meaningful parameters, which in turn allows for higher level control of the robot. Another benefit is that it allows controllers to be defined by “composing shapes”, which enables developing controllers that can adapt to the surroundings. Using shape composition, we implemented a novel gait, named rolling hump, which forms a contour-fitting hump to negotiate obstacles. The efficacy of a snake robot climbing over obstacles by using the rolling hump is experimentally evaluated. An autonomous control strategy is presented and realized in simulation.